then there's the police generating AI child porn to post on pedo forums to, uh, to catch pedos?
This is a real thing, swedish police got the go-ahead to do it some months ago and iirc danish police have been doing it for years already. Fucking wonderful to think about, isn't it?

to be fair i genuinely think the vast vast vast majority of people aren't inherently like this, it's taken decades of effort to train the population to suppress their own cognition in this way.

at this point i don't even need them to admit they're anything but angelic of mind, all i need them to admit is "i made a mistake, i fucked up and should have acted differently".
And yet even that is beyond most trump voters.

because the dress is clearly shading itself, which.. only happens if it's being directly illuminated..
Idk have you ever looked at things during daytime?

Eeeeeh i largely disagree. We can objectively measure the world, and 99% of the time what we see is close enough to what we can measure with stuff like spectrometers.

There's a reason we consider optical illusions noteworthy: They're edge cases, different from our usual experience of largely accurately perceiving the world. And the vast majority of the time these optical illusions have to be specifically created, they don't tend to just appear in nature.

with our eyes, bert.

Same, i simply cannot find any other explanation for it. Apparently a significant amount of the population cannot do white-balancing in their head.
I have to assume they still experience the more physical white-balancing from light depleting the stuff in cone cells though: that thing where if you close one eye for a bit while looking at a sunny landscape, then open it and compare to the other eye by alternating which one you close; you'll see the world tinted.. i think it's blue-green-ish and red-ish depending on the eye. Different tint depending on the eye, at least.

We're seeing (presuming other people who see it as black and blue aren't having some strange different experience, somehow) an image that is very very very very obviously taken in bright yellow/orange-tinted light, and just intuitively doing mental white balancing on it.

This is roughly what we interpret the dress as looking like under normal white lighting:

I see it as obviously black and blue, but i think the idea that anyone sees navy blue is a misconception and leads to much of the confusion. What i instinctively interpret it as is something closer to sky coloured, but clearly blue.

The black is a bit different because it's very clearly showing up as golden to the camera, but 1) it would be a very fucking ugly colour of lacing, 2) the photo is clearly taken in strongly coloured bright lighting so it's pretty obviously not the colour it looks like, and 3) it's a pretty safe assumption that any dark lacing is just pitch black.

This is basically what i intuitively interpret it as looking like in more normal lighting:

as a person who sees it as utterly obviously black and blue, i certainly don't literally see the same colours as the photo in normal lighting. What i see is precisely the colours you indicate (#7a6642 and #8596bb), but then my brain does white balancing and i interpret the materials as actually looking like this, which is i think quite clearly black and blue, if rather sun-bleached:

And the original image again for contrast:

https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness/

it specifically doesn't explain that